Lowering Consumption By Decreasing The Limit
What would happen if the power limit (not to be confused with Nvidia’s power target) was lowered manually? Would it be possible to trade a small and expected performance hit for significantly lower power consumption akin to what we see at Full HD? Unfortunately, no.
Check out the following graph. The y-axis shows the W/FPS ratio, which it to say that it shows how many watts are needed per frame per second. The x-axis shows the power limits. The numbers next to the lines stand for the actual FPS at the power target in question.
Even though the power consumption decreases from 267W to 170W when the power limit is set to -50 percent, the resulting frame rates just aren’t in the playable range any more. Higher power limit settings do not show imported results, either. The minimum and average frames per second, as well as the power consumption, stay the same. Things actually look about the same at Full HD, but the power consumption is low enough in that scenario that there’s no point to changing the settings anyway.